Evidently, several employees agreed and contacted the National Union of Journalists. Their views have been turned into a lengthy article by the NUJ's northern regional organiser, Chris Morley.

I am granting Morley what amounts to a "right of reply" by running his piece here. But I have also given the editor of the Birmingham Mail, Steve Dyson, the chance to respond as well, a "right of reply to the right of reply" if you like.

Let's begin with Morley:

There was just one problem with Roy Greenslade's eulogy to the Birmingham Post and Mail's new multimedia newsroom. He only looked at the operation, not at the people who have to make it work.

Perhaps he was dazzled by all the screens or bamboozled by his conversations with the editors, but his picture of a happy ship breezing into the digital future is not the one seen by the staff.

Over the last couple of days I have been talking to the journalists and all are agreed that the project is being undermined by a chronic shortage of staff and the consequent pressure on them to work too fast and too long.

The technology and the multiple platforms are fine, they say, but there are not enough people to exploit them. The sense of achievement that convinced Greenslade is only there because of massive overwork on the part of staff who are professionally committed to the success of the papers and their online products.

Greenslade acknowledges that 65 jobs were lost in the changeover; that's a quarter of the staff - and it was more when unfilled vacancies were taken into account. Can't he imagine what the results of that might be?

The business desk, for a start, consists of three senior journalists, plus one newly qualified and one trainee. They must produce 80 pages a week for the Post and ten for the Mail, on top of which they are expected to blog regularly. With days off and holidays it is rare that the desk is fully staffed; hence the pages are regularly filled with rewritten press releases.

Business features are suffering. Under pressure to fill the pages, contacts or "guest writers" are invited to send in their own badly-written, impenetrable copy that the subs are finding it hard to make sense of; one sub said: "What purports to be a high-quality product is often full of unreadable crap." From March, the business editors are also going to have to lay out their pages.

As for sport, the reporters are regularly doing 10-11 hour days, and football reports are getting past a joke. At and after matches they often have to write three different reports for the different titles, including one straight after the final whistle, and get quotes from managers and players – which is impossible because the players have usually disappeared by the time the managers' presscons are over.

As Greenslade recounts breathlessly, they also do liveblogging. But it isn't always "live"; it appears no-one realised that you can't just turn up at a football ground with a computer and start liveblogging, because that kind of access is what Sky and the BBC pay squillions of pounds for. There are only certain windows during which you can blog, so reporting a goal can happen up to 15 minutes late.

As for the subeditors working across several titles, they find the job soul-destroying. With former sports subs doing arts features, with former news subs doing sport and former features subs doing these badly written business features, no-one has a feel for the job anymore.

Reporters are becoming remote from their readers; jobs aren't being covered because there just aren't the bodies to do them, and it still takes the same time to research a story properly and write it, before you even get to the online stuff. The overwhelming mood among the reporters is that they do want to do video etc, but they just haven't got the time.

In the districts, there are now only three reporters to cover the 1.1m population of the Black Country and a huge swathe of territory around Birmingham.

The Post and Mail journalists do the job because they love it and they do so without complaint, but the number of reporters who admit (off the record) to cutting corners to get the job done is astonishing.

Newsdesk staff and department heads are working 12-hour days. One said last week that they shouldn't be in the office because they were so ill, but there was no-one else to do the job.

And yes, the Post and Mail do still have an office in the city centre, but it's a small unit in a shopping arcade in which reporters can hot-desk; they are grateful for it, though, because it means they don't have to keep trekking out to Fort Dunlop.

Greenslade says Fort Dunlop is not remote, but that's not true if you rely on public transport. Once you get there, there is nowhere to go outside the building at lunchtime other than an overpriced bar/lounge.

I can see that the Fort Dunlop newsroom can give the impression that it works well, but it only does so because of people's goodwill. I would have expected Greenslade to dig a bit deeper – but that's reporting in the multimedia age, isn't it? You just don't have the time to do the job properly.

Now here is Steve Dyson's reply to that:

"There are many factual errors in this note, especially regarding the specifics claimed in business, sport and multimedia resource. Following our restructure, there's a much wider shared resource in Birmingham, and this can be channelled into areas where we feel it is needed at various times rather than building Chinese walls all over the place.

"For example, if and when needed, the business desk can increase in size to meet needs at particular times. This has happened on various occasions. Similarly, if and when needed, there are two and sometimes three reporters at certain football matches to tackle different reports for different titles and online.

"Is it all working perfectly yet? No, or course not, there is a good six months' worth of settling down and tweaking to do to a restructure which fundamentally changed the way we work.

"Are we relying on the goodwill of staff to help us through this period? Too right we are, and it's there in boatloads, because our staff want to make this work, they want their brands to survive and prosper and they want good, well-paid jobs in the current economic climate.

"We will continue to work with our staff, and to talk with their local representatives - please note the word local! - about continually improving the new structure. Importantly, though, it's already working. Now we need to concentrate all efforts to make it work better and better."

Finally, a last comment from me: I don't take back what I wrote originally. It is true that I spoke only to editors and senior journalists, with the exception of a single reporter (though I wasn't prevented from speaking to anyone).

I cannot think of one newspaper office in Britain where there are not deeply-held negative views - about owners, managers, editors, nature of the job, working conditions etc. At a time of revolutionary change, those views are likely to be even more negative, though they are rarely expressed openly to bosses.

Surely that's the situation at Fort Dunlop too. It says much about the problem we all face as journalists in trying to tell the truth that a single reality can be reported so differently by different people.